I am the founder & “Content Guy” for MorningNewsBeat.com, a website that curates business news, offering both context & analysis with an attitude that has been honed by more than 25 years of writing about retail and the food business. I'm a frequent speaker at business conferences and an adjunct faculty member for Portland State University’s Center for Retail Leadership in Oregon, and co-authored “The Big Picture: Essential Business Lessons from the Movies,” which uses film narratives to teach about leadership, marketing and surviving the workplace. I've worked as a newspaper reporter, magazine writer, video producer, bodyguard, and clothing salesman. And, I've supervised a winery tasting room (happily), run two marathons (slowly), driven a racecar (badly), taken boxing lessons (painfully) and acted in a major (and obscure) motion picture.

Must-See Consumption Realities

I’m old enough to remember a little something called Must-See TV … that’s what NBC used to call Thursday nights, when it broadcast situation comedies like “The Cosby Show,” “Mad About You,” Cheers,” and “Seinfeld,” as well as dramas like “Hill Street Blues” and “E.R.” The idea was that you had to stay home on Thursday nights to watch the best of what TV had to offer. And those were the days before the plethora of cable channels vastly expanded what was available to the average viewer; three or four major networks almost a monopoly on the audience of people who wanted to watch TV.

Those were the days.

These days, of course, there’s no such thing. With few exceptions, anybody with internet access can watch pretty much anything anytime. We don’t even need a TV. Just a computer of some sort. Or even a smart phone.Well, add to this tapestry of “I’ll see it when I want to” the following statistic, as reported by BloombergBloomberg: Nielsen is out with a study saying that more 18-24 year olds use FacebookFacebook during prime time viewing hours than watch any of the major networks. “Fifty percent of television and computer users in that age group will access Facebook between 8 p.m. and 11 p.m. on weeknights, according to Nielsen,” the story says. “The four networks included in the study, meanwhile, attracted 37 percent to 43 percent of those people.”

Now, as we all know, research like this often depends on who is answering the questions, how the questions are being phrased, and even who is paying for the research. (In this case, Facebook. Go figure.)

But that doesn’t mean the numbers are wrong, and it certainly doesn’t mean the trend can be ignored.

There are real business implications for this trend, Bloomberg writes: “The report is Nielsen’s first major study comparing Facebook’s user base with TV audiences, giving advertisers a window into the demographics of both platforms. The information also provides Facebook with fresh ammunition as it fights to break television’s dominance over ad budgets. The company is planning to sell TV-style commercials on its site for as much as $2.5 million a day, people familiar with the matter have said.”

The lesson should be taken to heart by anyone selling products or services to consumers. Competition can come from any direction, and can threaten whatever connection you think you have to the marketplace. You may think you have a must-have product or service, but the simple reality is that it is only must-have today. Tomorrow, the scenario may be different.

By the way, while we’re considering the ways in which television has changed…

There happened to be a piece I saw on Twice.com that reflected another changed reality – that new research from the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) says that just seven percent of US TV households “rely solely on an antenna to receive their television programming.” That’s down from eight percent in 2010. And, in fact, 83 percent of US households use traditional pay-TV services, such as cable, satellite or fiber optic, to get their programming.

But here’s the kicker on that number – it is down five percentage points since 2010, which means that even pay-TV services that revolutionized the industry just a relatively few years ago are seeing some erosion because of an increasing number of people who are accessing that material via their desktop computers, laptops, tablets and smartphones.

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